3
Most of what everyone else complained and continue to complain about made me grumble at the most.
3rd person? I guess I can live with it.
Consumables? Wasn't necessary, but if they must.
Terrible weapon balance? Creates lack of diversity, but I guess it'll have to do.
Terrain mechanics? Sometimes stumbling on a tiny rock makes my blood pressure rise but meditation and massive doses of sedatives have kept me at bay.
Lack of content? The game itself got pretty boring a long time ago but I play with a group of fantastic players who I consider great people and friends. They kept me entertained far past the point when the game got stale.
Bad matchmaking? It gets boring when the only way matchmaker can challenge you is by putting the worst players on your team instead of putting 2 elite teams against each other. On occasion when enough good players are online things can be interesting and fun, but most of the time the matchmaking is awful. Still, I can live with it. When you get good enough at the game you can win regardless so it only made me twitch a little.
Absolutely abysmal hit detection? This is the deal breaker. When I can't damage what I hit, I am no longer playing an FPS. I'm playing a board game with diceroll. Yes, I'm piloting a mech in the first person and I'm interacting with other mechs. For the past few months, when I shoot a mech, there's a significant percent chance that I do either no damage or significantly reduced damage. Hit detection is ruined.
I was extremely annoyed at this before I took my ~1 month break from this game, but after I loaded it up again last week after playing a month worth of another FPS with perfect hit detection, I realized how much I don't want to ever play this game again simply because of bad hit detection. Everyone has their set of criteria about what makes a game fun, and one of mine is being rewarded for being good at one of the most fundamental parts of said game, which in the case of MWO happens to be shooting. I am a good shot. There is no doubt about it. I just started playing Planetside 2 for the past month, and I am, according to the game's player stat database, ranked #15th for headshot ratio in the entire game for the SVA-88 LMG. Suffice to say that I can point and click at your face pretty quick and without much of a sweat.
Without hit detection, this game effectively removes an attribute of mine that is supposed to make me an extremely formidable opponent and throws it out the window. Not only does it do that, but it penalizes me multiplefold:
After I shoot you in the face and you take no damage, I now have to wait till my weapons cool down so I can attempt to shoot at your face again, this time hopefully for damage.
I've gained a considerable amount of heat. I won't have infinite attempts at shooting at your face because after this second shot, I may be at my heat threshold.
I've wasted ammo. I can only carry so many tons.
I've exposed myself to shoot you, did zero damage to you, and now you have a chance to shoot me back. You may also do zero damage to me, or you may do between zero and the right amount. Either way, I have traded 0 damage to you for potential damage to me, at no fault of my own. I cannot “learn to shoot better” in this instance, as I have already shot at your face, and your face is fine.
With bad hit detection, my superior aim is rendered to a “by chance” phenomenon, and so is my opponent's. If my opponent can roll the right hit detection dice and I keep rolling snake eyes (especially if I'm badly damaged) I'm really screwed. I wouldn't be too worried about facing a fresh opponent whilst I'm damaged if hit detection were fine for me, but alas with bad hit detection it gives my fresh opponent more chances to roll the dice and damage me.
If this game was advertised as a diceroll FPS, I would never have installed it, ever. I'm not the type of guy that opens himself up to chance. I make my own luck, thank you very much. Hit detection seems to be a really controversial issue in these parts and before I took a month off, I kind of accepted that more or less. I'd been dealing with playing with a handicap for so long I forgot what it was like to play a game that didn't give you one, and rewarded you for being a good shot. When I played a few rounds last week, boy did I not compensate for not being able to do damage on X% of my shots. I had to play conservatively, which simply isn't my style. I'm Rambo. I like to jump into the fray and shred you to pieces. Sure, I can still win, because regardless of what diceroll I get, I'm still going to be aiming at the same components. But it's not the type of win I'm looking for. I don't believe in balancing out skill. If I'm 100 times better than you then our duel better look humiliating.
There seems to be two different issues that plague me with not registering damage. One is bad hit detection that happens totally randomly. It can happen a seemingly unlimited times in a row, whereby I repeatedly fire on a mech and they either flash light yellow with a red crosshair (reduced damage) or the crosshair doesn't go red and they take absolutely no damage. I've had a bunch of guys spectate me, including kaffeangst, End Crescendo, Villz, JP (in which they can see from a server side perspective) and watch me nail an enemy dead CT for zero damage repeatedly for over 8 shots. This is not infrequent. It plagues my gaming experience. Another example is when I'll cycle my weapons as fast as they can fire. So it will look like this (and I'm only talking about crosshairs turning red here):
2 AC5= hit
2 AC5=hit
2 PPC= no hit
2 AC5=hit
2 AC5=no hit
2 AC5=no hit
2 PPC= no hit
Unacceptable= not acknowledged by PGI
The other issue is desync, which used to happen to me more a few months ago but happens to me extremely rarely today if any. Basically, I would shoot at an enemy, but when one of my buddies would spectate me he would notice that my shot would miss them by a mechlength when I in fact hit them perfectly well on my screen. Like I said, I don't experience this a whole lot a anymore and is not much of a problem.
I've talked to and personally met some of the IGP devs of this game. They seemed like really cool and knowledgeable people and we got along well. One of the devs tried to help me with my hitreg problems and they tried their best. I know that if it were up to them, they would make this game playable for me and for all of us. I know it's totally out of their control and that they never thought for a second that PGI could hash out such a botched up product. I know what it's like to hire someone that doesn't deliver and because of this I 100% sympathize with IGP and all of their developers. The IGP devs that I spoke to genuinely cared about my gaming experience and trying to make it positive and I'm just one guy. I know for a fact that the IGP guys care about the product they deliver just based on my interaction with them. They just trusted the wrong people, a mistake that anyone could have made.
If a player like me, who has endured and accepted each and every decision-- however controversial or unpopular that has been made so far by PGI, has had enough, it's time to look at how your game works. I have put in so far about over $1000 dollars into this game, and I couldn't care less at this point about not playing it because the product I invested in no longer works. It's broken. Fix it.
***Sorry about the typo on the title. What are you gonna do?
***And how could I possibly forget?: LORD STEEL
ggclose
Edited by Ryan Steel, 31 January 2014 - 03:32 PM.
